Why are international news networks in the USA e.g CNN,USA providing a limited array of stories?

Question

I was shocked when i was in the US to discover that news in the USA does not give a true picture of what is happening in the world like the way BBC and Al Jazeera and to a limited degree CNN (international) do. May be it explains why the majority of Americans actually believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 yet the rest of the world knew otherwise.

Answer 1

Ignorance and apathy is one aspect... for the most part we don't ask ourselves "what news am I NOT getting?" and we don't know (or care about) what we don't know, so we don't demand better or expect better than to be a captive audience served up to advertisers. Even more incideous, over the past several decades, conglomerates have steadily 'gobbled up' print, radio and TV media resulting in more 'homogenized' and less variety of perspectives. Currently, our FCC steadily pushes toward a December goal of to relax restrictions even further which will allow the conglomerates to buy even more outlets in concentrated areas. I don't watch mainstream media for these reasons, but my guess is they are giving the "fairness doctrine" more attention than the FCC selling out to corporate pressure... the REAL 'fairness' issue.

At one time our airwaves were deemed to be 'public domain' and broadcasters had to prove they were serving the public interest as a condition for license renewal. Now, license renewals are little more than mailing in a card to be rubber-stamped. If you saw the movie "Network" (Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, William Holden) released about thirty years ago... the concepts of 'corporate ownership' and 'news for profit' that were presented as Orwellian "what if" scenarios in that movie have now become the sad reality of US mass media today.

Answer 2

CNN is interested in keeping its rating up and therefore shows stories that will attract viewers. International news is less interesting to a vast number of people in the US than fluff pieces about celebrities. I'm not saying this is right, because it's not, just that the average person has limited interest in the happening around the world than they should